The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Forty years ago, the Theory of Evolution went to court in Tennessee. William Jennings Bryan won a Pyrrhic victory, and the Great Controversy was settled at last.

Twenty years ago, controversy returned—this time not Religion embattled against Science, but a fight between scientific-political ideologies. The USSR claimed Dr. Lysenko had demonstrated the pre-Darwinian (Lamarckian) theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. American scientists laughed.

A decade later, Lysenko was “out” in his own country; and a young instructor at the University of Michigan started playing With worms. By now, several thousands of flatworms have run mazes, suffered electric shocks, had bright lights shined in their eyes, eaten their shredded relatives, bathed in solutions of RNAse—and firmly established the fact that acquired characteristics can be inherited (not to mention, ingested).

Although the worms are running—or wriggling, more likely-all over the “free world,” the center of activity is Dr. James V. McConnell’s Planaria Research Group, at the University of Michigan. In last year’s Annual, I reported happily on the PRCs highly unsettling publication, The Worm Runner’s Digest. Now Prentice-Hall has brought out The Worm Re-Turns, a sampler from the Digest (featuring more of the satiric than the serious side of recent events in the evolution of Evolution—but with a gleeful “compulsory introduction,” by Arthur Koestler providing a colorful account of the subversive behavior of flatworms).

“As matters stand at present,” the introduction explains, “the asexual transmission of learnt experience can no longer be denied, whereas its sexual transmission is passionately denied by orthodox science—which leads to the perversely paradoxical conclusion that the lower animals must have an incomparably more efficient evolutionary mechanism at their disposal than the higher ones. Thus Coli bacteria have the privilege of inheriting acquired immunity against streptomycin, whereas the evolution in higher animals depends on chance alone; the lower species are capable of profiting from the past experience of the race, in the higher species it is wasted.”

Which brings us roughly even with the present state of confusion—except for the contribution provided by Dr. Nesvadba.